Pan Tadeusz - Quand Napoléon traversait le Niemen

The best movie I seen in a long time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should have made this movie a nominee for the FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM category at the 2000 Oscar's (I think the Academy is biased against such true works of art and history). This movie above all others should have been nominated, what is wrong with the Academy?

Excellent movie! Wajda has done an excellent job. Wajda is indeed the world's greatest movie director. Congratulations to Wajda on the Oscar you deserve it more than anyone else.

I don't blame any non-Polish viewers for being confused or simply bored. Not at all. At the moment I'm even trying to imagine how it feels watching this picture without being able to refer anytime to the knowledge of the book and the cultural background. I guess it makes you feel lost and empty-headed.

First of all, the screen play was created in a very unusual way. The dialogs were not written, but extracted from the poem, some of them being full rhyming lines and some only parts. Of course most of the meaningful and informative pieces were in the narrative section of the poem and somehow didn't make it to the screen. I'm all for "show not tell", but "don't show, don't tell, everybody knows it all from school" is not the top shelf of movie-making to me.

All that is shown is pretty people, pretty costumes, pretty interiors, pretty nature. Definitely pleasant to see for anyone who likes pictures with historical settings and would like to get to know something about the life in a particular time and place.

The movie really works only for people who have read the poem and have been taught about its historical background. After such preparation they can enjoy this multimedia reconstruction of the characters and places from the book, because that's rather what it is to me. Indeed, all the actors are good, music memorable and all the details nicely done, but this production really lacks the cinematic backbone and something that would allow it to be a movie on its own.

Although I am Polish by extraction, I had never read or been told the story of this great, early 19th century Polish classic poem. To my delight the tale of rustic Lithuania, at the time of Napoleon is exciting, warm, tender and just sweeps you off your feet.

The dialogue is drawn directly from the poem so it is in rhyming couplets. The acting styles and set design marvelously match the romantic, expressive language. The poem was published in 1834 and Adam Miczkiewicz was, I understand, influenced by Walter Scott. The English subtitles fail the film badly. They should have taken the risk of using a translation in a similar style. Unfortunately, for a non-Polish speaking person, I expect it is like watching Shakespeare translated into the language of the evening news. It looks terrific but a lot of the richness is missed.

Pan Tadeusz had a huge impact on Polish audience this year. The film, which was made on a three-million dollar budget, beat all records of popularity in Poland. On the first weekend 420,000 Poles saw the movie. By mid-November more than three million Poles watched Pan Tadeusz in the 130 movie theaters nationwide.

We can expect high popularity level in Lithuania, and, maybe, to some extent in Belarus. But otherwise, the movie will be overlooked and probably discarded by the people who are not familiar with the history of the region, namely, with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the union with Recz Pospolita (The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).

For Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians this is a movie that brings back poignant nostalgia for the glorious past of the Duchy. For everyone else, it is just another historical ballad, based on the classical poem of Adam Mickiewicz.

The director, Andrzej Wajda, did a wonderful job -- the casting seems almost perfect, the whole organization is very nice, the acting is powerful. Some Polish movie critics predict that the film is going to be nominated for Oscar, but as far as it looks now, it is going to be huge -- but only on a regional scale.

In the modern times absorbed so much by computers, technology, materialism, it seems that such values like love, patriotism, sense of beauty and quest for the sublime belong to the days of yore, the days of fairies, poets and nobles. Yet, on such occasions like national holidays that usually serve to remind nations of their identities, human thoughts go towards our ancestors, those who created a nation, played a decisive role in what we are and who we are now. And in this very spirit, on November the 11th when my country celebrates the Independence Day, my friends and I have decided to see the significant movie by Andrzej Wajda. It is worth stating here that the film, the action of which takes place in 1811 and 1812, 16 years after Poland was entirely partitioned among Germany, Austria and Russia, is based on the key work of Polish literature --- 12 Books of Verse titled PAN TADEUSZ and written in Paris in the 1830s by the famous Pole Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855).

The goals of watching being purely patriotic, the movie appeared to us as convincing, more to say, interesting from the very beginning. However, the experience of the movie was not merely a patriotic awareness that would truly be applied to a limited number of viewers but something much more, something I would like to share with other people no matter what nationality, upbringing, culture they are - a treasure that seems lost in most modern movies yet found in the great effort to craft cinematic productions based on classical literature. Certainly, it is a serious effort to adapt 1800s' romantic verses to the expectations of modern movie buffs...

"O Lithuania, my country, thou Art

like good health; I never knew till now

How precious, till I lost thee."

(translation by Kenneth R. Mackenzie)

That is how PAN TADEUSZ by Adam Mickiewicz begins, that is how PAN TADEUSZ by Andrzej Wajda ends and what is in between?

A great story of courage, love, sensation, uprising, honor, politics (in the times of Napoleon - a great hope for the partitioned Poland), confession and ... reconciliation: something classical, universal, touching, humane, pure and upright. One could indeed enumerate such adjectives... How does it work in practice? On the one hand, we have a particular focus on national identity and duty while, on the other hand, the emphasis is drawn upon particular characters. To view comes young Tadeusz Soplica (Michal Zebrowski) in love with two female characters: one is Zosia (Alicja Bachleda) – a 14-year-old girl of youthful, innocent joys; the other is Telimena (Grazyna Szapolowska) - a lady of extravagant behavior and tastes of luxury. In between come various characters, including impetuous Gerwazy (Daniel Olbrychski), young count-artist Horeszko (Marek Kondrat), and a humble priest Robak (Boguslaw Linda) who hides his secret till the very last hour of his life ...

The factor that goes with characters and, more specifically, the manner we perceive them is the strongest point of the movie: performances. Although the task to play the roles and say their lines in poem appears to be particularly difficult, most of the cast craft their performances with exceptional flair. It is thanks to them that we all may feel the story go on naturally. Daniel Olbrychski is magnificent as Gerwazy focusing on the aforementioned impetuosity, Boguslaw Linda can be referred to as 'convincing modesty', Ms Szapolowska says her lines with desirable elegance and Michal Zebrowski together with youthful Alicja Bachleda are a fine staff for the couple in love.

Since Mickiewicz payed particular attention to the descriptions of nature, the film does not skip this aspect. It can boast wonderful shots of the green fields, memorable clouds, returning storks, silent forests and beautiful sunsets. Being filmed in an artistic manner, it evokes a unique atmosphere and constitutes a sort of moving painting of idyllic landscapes. The narration by Adam Mickiewicz portrayed by Krzysztof Kolberger adds more importance to it providing the emotions of the author. The brilliant direction by Andrzej Wajda and the musical score by Wojciech Kilar supply a viewer with undeniable experience. Moreover, some scenes remain so intensely in the memory that any sensitive viewer (sensitive to art) will truly be absorbed by watching. Here, I would like to mention famous bear hunting, confession of Jacek Soplica and witty but elegant coffee making sequence. Just a pity there is not a famous mushroom picking tour described widely by Mickiewicz.

If you asked me what this movie means to me, my answer would be simple: an experience for eyes and soul, great cinema which returns after a period of absence, which returns like the upright storks that long for the sublimity of patriot's homeland.